Teacher Skill Building Initiative Targets Math for English Language Learners
CHICAGO, IL -- The Education Department, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Columbia College Chicago has received $305,058 to continue their work on “Extending Teacher Capacity to Increase ELL Success in Mathematics.” The funds were awarded through the Illinois Board of Higher Education’s “No Child Left Behind: Improving Teacher Quality” program. This is the fifth year Columbia has received funding for the initiative.
The grant will allow Columbia’s Education Department to continue providing professional development for elementary school teachers to enhance their ability to teach math more effectively to English language learners (ELL). The project activities will provide professional development for a cohort of at least 30 teachers, giving them tools and strategies to adapt standards-based mathematics instruction to match the linguistic needs of students enrolled in bilingual or English-as-a-new language (ENL) programs. To that end, the project is designed to integrate mathematics with the study of language and with the arts to increase the probability for academic success.
Members of the college’s Education Department will work in partnership with the Chicago Public School District #299 and Summit School District #104 to provide teachers with information, plans, opportunities and tools to ensure successful learning among language minority students. These activities will improve teacher practice by addressing mathematical content knowledge, prepare a cohort of teacher leaders, introduce pedagogies for using art projects to teach ENL students, and develop an integrated math, ENL and arts curriculum.
According to Dr. Ava Belisle-Chatterjee, Chair of the Education Department, “We have found that the same rich contexts and strategies that are used to develop mathematical concepts in a standards-based curriculum are also useful for developing second language proficiency. And the interactional nature of the arts, where learning emerges from doing or making the art form, dovetails with both research-based approaches used for second language learning and with those approaches recommended in standards-based mathematics curricula, which demand that students do mathematics.”
This phase of the grant will focus on program sustainability by providing professional development for teachers to assume school-based leadership roles necessary for this initiative to continue to thrive. In addition, the grant will focus on including the department’s Master of Arts in Teaching students in the project’s professional development activities. It will also pilot the use of the lesson study approach with a small group of faculty members from other departments in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
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